Most likely,
everything that could be said about Warren McCulloch has been said already and, most
likely, everything that McCulloch ever said, had never been said before.

What to say now about Warren McCulloch
and what he did say.

I am most grateful to
Seymour Papert. who concluded his introduction to the first published collection of some
of McCulloch´s essays, Embodiments of Mind (1), by
reminding us of one of his favorite teaching aids to help his baffled disciples to
overcome their bebafflement: "Don´t bite my finger, look where I am pointing."

What is he pointing
at? For me he is pointing at pointing. What do I mean by that? Let me give examples. At
one place (2) he discusses potential and limits of what we
do or what we do not know. And then:

"With all of these limitations and
hazards well in mind, let us ask whether a knower so conceived is capable of constructing
the physics of the world which includes himself," and then he continues: "But,
in so doing, let us be perfectly frank to admit that causality is a superstition."

The first part connects McCulloch to
himself; in the second part he connects with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a connection about which
I shall talk later.

The fascinating
problem of inclusion appears at another place (3), where
he talks about constructs in theoretical physics, ".... we invent surprising
regularities ... or invariants, which I call ideas, whether they are theorems of great
abstraction or qualities simple sensed." He noticed they are not included into
physics proper and he proposes:

"... let us now compel our physicist
to account for himself as a part of the world. In all fairness, he must stick to his own
rules and show in terms of mass, energy, space and time how it comes about that he creates
theoretical physics. He must then become a neurophysiologist (that is what happened to
me), but in so doing he will be compelled to answer whether theoretical physics is
something which he can discuss in terms of neurophysiology (and that is what
happened to me). To answer "No" is to remain a physicist undefiled. To answer
"Yes" is to become a metaphysician - or so I am told."

No! Nobody told him
that; I say it is what he wanted to be. Remember him telling us of a desparate Clerk
Maxwell who addressed himself to an in principle undecidable question, namely, how to
explain "thought" ab ovo, that ist (4):
"He (Maxwell) cut short his query with the memorable phrase, 'but does not the way to
it lie through the very den of the metaphysician, strewn with the bones of former
explorers and abhorred by every man of science?', "To which McCulloch responds,
"Let us peacefully answer the first half of this question 'Yes', the second half
'No', and then proceed serenely."

Indeed, let us join McCulloch and proceed
serenely with him in a quest for treasures that will lead us through spaces cluttered with
horrors for the fainthearted. Even those bones can not scare us because, as he says later,
he expects some of his own to fall besides them.

And now, let this journey be a party by
inviting not only metaphysics by herself, but also our friends from Crete and Elea, and at
last but not least Carlos Castaneda's brujo Don Juan in the company of "Uncle
Ludwig", I mean, of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Metaphysics

The charm of her character
lies in her elusiveness. Very much like her sister Language, who always runs on two
tracks, so when you think you catch her as denotative, she jumps to be connotative, and if
you think you have her there, she will be back at pointing, so it goes with Metaphysics.

Her nature is well accounted for
by the British scholar W.H. Walsh (5). he begins his
description of her character with the following sentence:

"Almost everything about Metaphysics
is controversial, and it is therefore not surprising that there is little agreement among
those who call themselves metaphysicians about what precisely it is they are
attempting."

When I proposed to invite Metaphysics to
join us on his quest it is not that I seek agreement with anybody else about her nature,
because I can say precisely what it is when we become metaphysicians. We become
metaphysicians, whether or not we call ourselves such, whenever we decide upon in
principle undecidable questions.

Questions of decidability have of course
ancient roots: "Can a circle be squared?", "Can an angle be
trisected?", etc., and then conditions are listed under which these problems are to
be solved: "With ruler and compass only!", "With ruler and conchoidograph
only!", etc.

These questions
floated amongst the learned for about two millenia until Gauss showed the unsolvability of
some and the solvability of others. It was Hilbert and Ackermann (6) who introduced the term "Entscheidungsproblem"
for similar questions in formal logic, a term later used by Godel (7) and Turing (8) to
demonstrate undecidability regarding some propositions in Russell's Principia and
in Hilbert's Funktionenkalkul respectively.

The formal fireworks illuminating these
profundities kept us from noticing such decidables in the use of language and in our daily
life. We know how to talk, but, I say, we have not the slightest idea how we do it, how we
ever learned this. Since these faculties can be mapped onto universal Turing Machines, and
since for these the general analytic problem is unsolvable in principle, these faculties,
in turn, are analytically undeterminable.

It is easy to find other such undecidable
questions, for instance, "How did our Universe come about?" Nobody was there,
how could we know? Nevertheless, there are many different answers. Some say it was an act
of creation a few thousand years ago; others suggest the Universe had no beginning and
will have no end: it is a self-generating system in a perpetual dynamic equilibrium;
others insist that what we see tofay are the remnants of a "Big Bang", perhaps
10 or 20 billion years ago, of which we can still hear a faint noise through large
microwave dishes. In this short list I have not mentioned what the Eskimos, the Arapesh,
the Ibos, the Balinese, and all the others would say should we ask them about this event.
In other words, "Tell me how the Universe came about, and I tell you who you are! Or
tell me about "consciousness", and I shall know something about you! How
come these many different answers for apparently one and the same question? This is clear,
because only those questions that are in principle undecidable we can
decide.

Why? Simply because all the decidable
questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked. It
may take a moment of reflection, or very hard work to decide them, eight years, for
instance, for Andrew Wiles to prove Fermat's last theorem, by then 200 years old. But
ultimately - thanks to the inescapable force of logic - we shall be rewarded with a
definite "Yes" or a definite "No".

A quite different affair is it with in
principle undecidable questions. We are under no compulsion, not even by the
"inescapable force of logic" which way to decide: we are free to decide in this
or that way, and then we have to take the responsibility for our decision. But who wants
to take responsibility? Pontius Pilatism, hierarchies, objectivity, the "selfish
gene", and other devices provide us with escape routes for avoiding it. Clearly,
making decisions on in principle undecidable questions is not for the fainthearted. Here
is another one to be decided by each of us:

"Am I apart from the
Universe? That is whenever I look I am looking as through a peephole upon an unfolding
universe."

"Am I part of the Universe?
That is whenever I act, I am changing myself and the universe as well."

McCulloch clearly does not avoid making
decisions. He opts for the one which includes himself in the world of his construction.
But in doing so, he had to free himself from the constraints of causality, ".. let us
be perfectly frank .... causality is a superstition."

Our Friends from Crete and
Elea

McCulloch
never wanted to cut the umbillical cord that connects him with the intellectual matrix of
the pre- and post-Socratic philosophers. In fact, he saw them all sitting around his
kitchen table, arguing with each other 'til the wee hours of the night (9):

"Anyone who had the good fortune to listen to Wiener and von Neumann and
Rosenblueth and Pitts wrestling with the problems of modern computing machines ..., has a
strange sense that he is listening to a colloqui of the ancients."

It is the life of the discussion, not ist
results, to which he is pointing: the logical curlicues, the frictions, the
contradictions, the tensions that keep the dialogue going.

While he takes the notion of invariants
from Parmenides, "All change is contradictory, therefore it does not exist," he
follows Heraklitus, "All change is contradictory, therefore contradiction is the
essence of life," and appreciates our Cretean friend's ultimate contradiction, the
"Liar's Paradox", as the ultimate logical perpetual motion machine: from
"false" it generates "true", from "true" it generates
"false", from "false" it generates ....., and so on and so forth. Or
take McCulloch's fascination with Zeno's "in between", the argument of
immeasurability: "Given two existents, there must be at least one in between."

This argument is a generatrix for
infinity with finite means. When I was a student, a 6-year old asked me to write an
infinite number, "Is it so long as to go to the moon?"
"No, not alt all," I suggested. "Write a number consisting of 1's only,
where each 1 stands in between two other 1's. He was happy. The next day he showed me an
infinite number and said, "You have to read it around."

If only our teachers would
understand that!

*****

But who is suddenly crushing
the party? Clearly an elderly man, lively, dynamic and full of enthusiasm: "Your
logic is not rich enough to discuss all this and still keep hoping it will make
sense!"

It is Gotthard Gunther, the
eminent Hegelian and student of Eastern philosophy. Warren met him in Richmond, Virginia,
in the early sixties, a fugitive from Hitler's Germany, lost for a while in South Africa,
and then living on a tiny grant for work on non-Aristotelian logic in Richmond.

"Heinz, here is a man
who asks all the right questions. Invite him to your Lab." This was Warren's voice
over the telephone at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Of course, I invited
Gunther, and he stayed with us for many years, teaching us his "place-value
logic" which requires a "place" to be stipulated first into which a
proposition may enter before its fate can be considered, namely, to become either true or
false. Logical richness is now created by being in a position to reject the entire
proposition in its affirmative or negative mode.

If only our revolutionaries
would understand that: "Down with the king!" can turn into a commercial for, or
even paid by, the king.

Carlos
Castaneda wanted to learn "how to see". Don Juan, a brujo living in Sonora, a
Northern State of Mexico, accepted him as a student. On one morning they broke up very
early, the sun not yet over the horizon, and began their march through the dense chapparal
of that region. After about one our walking Don Juan stopped suddenly and pointed in one
direction, "Carlos, did you see that?" "No", he replied "I didn't
see a thing." They continued their journey with the sun now rising. Don Juan:
"Carlos, did you see this?" and Carlos again : "What?" And so it went
again and again with the sun burning down onto the two travellers, and Castaneda seeing
nothing. Finally, Don Juan stopped and turned to Castaneda: "Carlitos, I know why you
can't see. You can see only that what you can explain. Don't do that, Look!"

In
explanations we wish to establish links between one affair and another one. But here
are Wittgenstein's propositions (11):

5.135 There is no possible
way of making an inference from the existence of one situation to the existence of another
entirely different situation.

5.136 There is no causal
nexus to justify such an inference.

5.1361 We cannot
infer the events of the future from those of the present. Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

And there is again
McCulloch: "... let us be perfectly frank to admit that causality is a
superstition."

Through common friends
living in Chicago he must have heard of my (very!) distant relationship with Ludwig
Wittgenstein. So, whenever I made a slip in a logical argument, he wiggled his forefinger
in front of my nose and said, "What would 'Uncle Ludwig' think about that?!"

In fact, it was more through
the friendship of my mother with Margaret Stomborough, Ludwig's sister, that I ever met
him when I was a little boy. I just had passed the entrance examination into Gymnasium,
the Austrian junior highschool, when my mother took me along for a visit at aunt Margaret.
It happened that her brother was there as well, and after a while he asked me what I
wanted to become when I am grown up. I knew exactly what I wanted to be and said "ein
Naturforscher", a naturalist, who, in my mind, is a combination of Raul Amundsen and
Marie Curie. "But then you must know a lot" he said. Since I had just passed my
entrance examination, I could confidently say "Yes, I do know a lot." He looked
at me smilingly and seriously, "But you don't know how right you are." (How was
I to understand that?)

When as
a student I took courses from the founders of the Vienna circle, Carnap, von Schlick,
Menger, Hahn and others, I came upon Wittgenstein again, this time through his Tractatus.
I was taken immediately by its precision, depth, clarity and brevity (only seven
propositions (not counting the sub- and the sub-sub- etc. propositions)), and there were
times, when I knew almost the entire Tractatus by heart. Fortunately, a cousin of mine, a
nephew of "uncle Ludwig", Paul Wittgenstein (12),
was affected by the Tractatus in very much the same way as I was. So, as a game, we tested
each other's competence by rattling off, on command, propositions x,y,z, etc. Already at
the early stages of my assimilation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I felt it
should be called Tractatus Ethico-Philosophicus. The propositions that set this feeling in
motion are under point 6, where he discusses the general form of propositions. This
culminates in proposition 6.421:

6.421 Es ist klar, daß sich
die Ethik nicht aussprechen läßt.

or in my translation into
English (the official one, I feel is just wrong):

6.421 It is clear, that
ethics cannot be articulated.

What
does he want to say with this cryptic statement? How can one understand it? My
understanding was to adopt for myself the following rule (13):
For any discourse I may have - say in science, philosophy, epistemology, therapy, etc. -
to master the use of my language so that ethics is implicit.

How can one justify this
understanding? Or better, who could justify such an interpretation?

As it
came somewhat late in my life, the justification came from an experimental
epistemologist. Among the many other clues, I found in McCulloch's "A Heterarchy of
Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets" (14)
the answer to my problem. It is the topology of our neuronal organization which, by its
double-closure, allows the so called "value anomaly" to arise. Here A is
preferred over B, B over C, and finally - Oh horror! - C over A. That is what experiments
teach us. What the epistemologist is telling us is that, keeping this in mind, the notion
of "hierarchy", the notion of a summum bonum collapses.

With this, the piedestal of
the moralist, who always tells the others how to act: "Thou shall ...",
"Thou shall not ..." vanishes, and we are left to our own devices: "I shall
...", "I shall not ...": ethics becomes implicit, responsibility explicit.

When
Rook McCulloch chose the papers that should go into the Collected Works by Warren
S. McCulloch (15), she placed his vision of the
Twilight of the Gods, the Norse Ragnar Rokr, at the end of the collection. Here is the end
of that end:

No more would I go along
with Plato in exiling the poets, who play on the limbic cortex. Not even they are powerful
enough to evoke the whole of man. If we are to survive our own destruction of our world
and of ourselves by our advance of culture we had better learn soon to modify our genes to
make us more intelligent. It is our last chance, that by increasing our diversity we may
be able to make some sort of man that can survive without an ecological niche on this our
earth. We may be able to live in gas masks and eat algae and distill the ocean.
I doubt that we have time enough.

We are, I think, nearing
the end of a course that left the main line of evolution to overspecialize in brain to its
own undoing.
Time will tell.

Lift up your hearts and
sing! Gather the clan,
The human brotherhood. Bend to the clay.
Build with exultant song and eager cry
Our desolation's dream, our nature's plan
Our earth, a temple to the yearning heart,
A city for the Soul. Let love hold sway,
And stupid selfishness and lonely lie
In silence end; while beauty that fore ran
Our wisdom shares in the language of a finished art
Its tranquil mood 'till work is done with play;
And we, the transients of life's finite span,
Make room for greater man and gladly die
Leaving to them the wages of our day,
The deep communion of the whole of man.